Empires in World History

Power and the Politics of Difference

Jane Burbank, Frederick Cooper

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781400834709
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

How empires have used diversity to shape the world order for more than two millennia Empires—vast states of territories and peoples united by force and ambition—have dominated the political landscape for more than two millennia. Empires in World History departs from conventional European and nation-centered perspectives to take a remarkable look at how empires relied on diversity to shape the global order. Beginning with ancient Rome and China and continuing across Asia, Europe, the Americas, and Africa, Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper examine empires' conquests, rivalries, and strategies of domination—with an emphasis on how empires accommodated, created, and manipulated differences among populations.Burbank and Cooper examine Rome and China from the third century BCE, empires that sustained state power for centuries. They delve into the militant monotheism of Byzantium, the Islamic Caliphates, and the short-lived Carolingians, as well as the pragmatically tolerant rule of the Mongols and Ottomans, who combined religious protection with the politics of loyalty. Burbank and Cooper discuss the influence of empire on capitalism and popular sovereignty, the limitations and instability of Europe's colonial projects, Russia's repertoire of exploitation and differentiation, as well as the "empire of liberty"—devised by American revolutionaries and later extended across a continent and beyond.With its investigation into the relationship between diversity and imperial states, Empires in World History offers a fresh approach to understanding the impact of empires on the past and present.

1

IMPERIAL TRAJECTORIES

We live in a world of nearly two hundred states. Each flaunts symbols of sovereignty—its flag, its seat in the United Nations—and each claims to represent a people. These states, big and small, are in principle equal members of a global community, bound together by international law. Yet the world of nation-states we take for granted is scarcely sixty years old.

Throughout history, most people have lived in political units that did not pretend to represent a single people. Making state conform with nation is a recent phenomenon, neither fully carried out nor universally desired. In the 1990s the world witnessed attempts by political leaders to turn the state into an expression of “their” nationality: in Yugoslavia—a country put together after World War I on terrain wrested out from the Ottoman and Habsburg empires—and in Rwanda, a former Belgian colony. These efforts to create homogeneous nations led to the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people who had lived side by side. In the Middle East, Sunnis, Shi’ites, Kurds, Palestinians, Jews, and many others have fought over state authority and state boundaries for more than eighty years since the end of the Ottoman empire. Even as people struggled for and welcomed the breakups of empires over the course of the twentieth century, conflicts over what a nation is and who belongs within it flared around the world.

In the 1960s, France, Great Britain, and other former colonial powers—whose empires had once embraced nearly a third of the world’s population—became more national after shedding most of their overseas parts, only to cede some of their prerogatives to the European Economic Community and later to the European Union. The breakup of the Soviet Union and its communist empire led to other shifts in sovereignty. Some new states declared themselves multinational—the Russian Federation—while others—Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan—strove to produce homogeneous nations out of their diverse peoples. In central Europe, leaders of several post-Soviet states—the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and others—turned in another direction and joined the European Union, giving up some of their reconstituted authority for the perceived advantages of belonging to a larger political unit.

These conflicts and ambiguities about sovereignty around the globe suggest that historical trajectories are more complicated than a movement toward nation-states. Empires—self-consciously maintaining the diversity of people they conquered and incorporated—have played a long and critical part in human history. For much of the last two millennia, empires and their rivalries, in regions or around the world, created contexts in which people formed connections—as ethnic or religious communities, in networks of migrants, settlers, slaves, and commercial agents. Despite efforts in words and wars to put national unity at the center of political imagination, imperial politics, imperial practices, and imperial cultures have shaped the world we live in.

This book does not follow the conventional narrative that leads inexorably from empire to nation-state. We focus instead on how different empires emerged, competed, and forged governing strategies, political ideas, and human affiliations over a long sweep of time—from ancient Rome and China to the present. We look at repertoires of imperial power—at the different strategies empires chose as they incorporated diverse peoples into the polity while sustaining or making distinctions among them.

Empires, of course, hardly represented a spontaneous embrace of diversity. Violence and day-to-day coercion were fundamental to how empires were built and how they operated. But as successful empires turned their conquests into profit, they had to manage their unlike populations, in the process producing a variety of ways to both exploit and rule. Empires mobilized and controlled their human resources differently, including or excluding, rewarding or exploiting, sharing out power or concentrating it. Empires enabled—and tried to control—connections and contacts. In some circumstances, people saw something to be gained from incorporation into a large and powerful state. More generally, empire was the political reality with which they lived. People labored in enterprises sustaining imperial economies, participated in networks nurtured by imperial contacts, and sought power, fulfillment, or simply survival in settings configured by imperial rule and by imperial rivalries. In some situations, people found ways to escape, undermine, or destroy imperial control; in others, they sought to build their own empires or to take the place of their imperial rulers. Empires compelled political controversies, innovations, conflicts, and aspirations well into the twentieth century. Even today, empire as a form, if not as a name, is still invoked as a political possibility.

Empire was a remarkably durable form of state. The Ottoman empire endured six hundred years; for over two thousand years a succession of Chinese dynasties claimed the mantle of imperial predecessors. The Roman empire exercised power for six hundred years in the western Mediterranean area, and its eastern offshoot, the Byzantine empire, lasted another millennium. Rome was evoked as a model of splendor and order into the twentieth century and beyond. Russia has for centuries sustained imperial ways of ruling over distinctive populations. By comparison, the nation-state appears as a blip on the historical horizon, a state form that emerged recently from under imperial skies and whose hold on the world’s political imagination may well prove partial or transitory.

The endurance of empire challenges the notion that the nation-state is natural, necessary, and inevitable, and points us instead toward exploring the wide range of ways in which people over time, and for better or worse, have thought about politics and organized their states. Investigating the history of empires does not imply praising or condemning them. Instead, understanding possibilities as they appeared to people in their own times reveals the imperatives and actions that changed the past, created our present, and perhaps will shape the future.

Imperial Repertoires

This book does not look at all empires in all times and places. It focuses on a set of empires whose histories were distinctive, influential, and, in many cases, entwined. Empires were not all alike; they created, adopted, and transmitted various repertoires of rule. Our chapters describe the ranges of ruling strategies that were imaginable and feasible in specific historical situations, the conflicts that emerged in different power structures, and the contentious relationships among empires that emerged at particular moments and over time drove world history.

An imperial repertoire was neither a bag of tricks dipped into at random nor a preset formula for rule. Faced with challenges day by day, empires improvised; they also had their habits. What leaders could imagine and what they could carry off were shaped by past practices and constrained by context—both by other empires with their overlapping goals and by people in places empire-builders coveted. People on contested territories could resist, deflect, or twist in their own favor the encroachment of a more powerful polity. Recognizing imperial repertoires as flexible, constrained by geography and history but open to innovation, enables us to avoid the false dichotomies of continuity or change, contingency or determinism, and to look instead for actions and conditions that pushed elements into and out of empires’ strategies.

Our argument is not that every significant state was an empire, but that for most of human history empires and their interactions shaped the context in which people gauged their political possibilities, pursued their ambitions, and envisioned their societies. States large and small, rebels and loyalists and people who cared little for politics—all had to take empires, their ways of rule, and their competitions into account. Whether this imperial framework has come to an end is a question we address in the final chapter.

We begin with Rome and China in the third century BCE, not because they were the first empires—their great predecessors include Egyptians, Assyrians, Persians, Alexander the Great’s enormous conquests, and more ancient dynasties in China—but because these two empires became longlasting reference points for later empire-builders. Rome and China both attained a huge physical size, integrated commerce and production into economies of world scale (the world that each of them created), devised institutions that sustained state power for centuries, developed compelling cultural frameworks to explain and promote their success, and assured, for long periods, acquiescence to imperial power. Their principal strategies—China’s reliance on a class of loyal, trained officials, Rome’s empowerment, at least in theory, of its citizens—had lasting and profound effects on how people imagine their states and their place in them.

We next consider empires that tried to move into Rome’s place—resilient Byzantium, the dynamic but fissionable Islamic caliphates, and the short-lived Carolingians. These rivals built their empires on religious foundations; their histories display the possibilities and limits of militant monotheism as an arm of state power. The drive to convert or kill the unfaithful and to spread the true faith mobilized warriors for both Christianity and Islam, but also provoked splits inside empires over whose religious mantle was the true one and whose claim to power was god-given.

In the thirteenth century, under Chinggis Khan and his successors, Mongols put together the largest land empire of all time, based on a radically different principle—a pragmatic approach to religious and cultural difference. Mongol khans had the technological advantages of nomadic societies—above all, a mobile, largely self-sufficient, and hardy military—but it was thanks to their capacious notions of an imperial society that they rapidly made use of the skills and resources of the diverse peoples they conquered. Mongols’ repertoire of rule combined intimidating violence with the protection of different religions and cultures and the politics of personal loyalty.

The Mongols are critical to our study for two reasons. First, their ways of rule influenced politics across a huge continent—in China, as well as in the later Russian, Mughal, and Ottoman empires. Second, at a time when no state on the western edge of Eurasia (today’s Europe) could command loyalty and resources on a large scale, Mongols protected trade routes from the Black Sea to the Pacific and enabled cross-continental transmission of knowledge, goods, and statecraft. Other empires—in the region of today’s Iran, in southern India or Africa, and elsewhere—are not described in any detail here, although they, too, promoted connections and change, long before Europeans appeared on the great-power scene.

It was the wealth and commercial vitality of Asia that eventually drew people from what is now thought of as Europe into what was for them a new sphere of trade, transport, and possibility. The empires of Spain, Portugal, France, the Netherlands, and Great Britain do not enter our account in the familiar guise of “the expansion of Europe.” In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Europe was unimaginable as a political entity, and in any case, geographical regions are not political actors. We focus instead on the reconfiguration of relations among empires at this time, a dynamic process whose consequences became evident only much later.

“European” maritime extensions were the product of three conditions: the high-value goods produced and exchanged in the Chinese imperial sphere; the obstacle posed by the Ottoman empire’s dominance of the eastern Mediterranean and land routes east; and the inability of rulers in western Eurasia to rebuild Roman-style unity on a terrain contested by rival monarchs and dynasts, lords with powerful followings, and cities defending their rights. It was this global configuration of power and resources that brought European navigators to Asia and, later, thanks to Columbus’s accidental discovery, to the Americas.

These new connections eventually reconfigured the global economy and world politics. But they were a long way from producing a unipolar, European-dominated world. Portuguese and Dutch maritime power depended on using force to constrain competitors’ commercial activity while ensuring that producers and local authorities in southeast Asia, where the riches in spices and textiles came from, had a stake in new long-distance trade. The fortified commercial enclave became a key element of Europeans’ repertoire of power. After Columbus’s “discovery,” his royal sponsors were able to make a “Spanish” empire by consolidating power on two continents and supplying the silver—produced with the coerced labor of indigenous Americans—that lubricated commerce in western Europe, across southeast Asia, and within the wealthy, commercially dynamic Chinese empire.

In the Americas, settlers from Europe, slaves brought from Africa, and their imperial masters produced new forms of imperial politics. Keeping subordinated people—indigenous or otherwise—from striking out on their own or casting their lot with rival empires was no simple task. Rulers of empires had to induce distant elites to cooperate, and they had to provide people—at home, overseas, and in between—with a sense of place within an unequal but incorporative polity. Such efforts did not always produce assimilation, conformity, or even resigned acceptance; tensions and violent conflict among imperial rulers, overseas settlers, indigenous communities, and forced migrants appear throughout our study.

Empire, in Europe or elsewhere, was more than a matter of economic exploitation. As early as the sixteenth century, a few European missionaries and jurists were making distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate forms of imperial power, condemning Europeans’ assaults on indigenous societies and questioning an empire’s right to take land and labor from conquered peoples.

It was only in the nineteenth century that some European states, fortified by their imperial conquests, gained a clear technological and material edge over their neighbors and in other regions of the world. This “western” moment of imperial domination was never complete or stable. Opposition to slavery and to the excesses and brutality of rulers and settlers brought before an engaged public the question of whether colonies were places where humans could be exploited at will or parts of an inclusive, albeit inequitable, polity. Moreover, the empires of China, Russia, the Ottomans, and Habsburgs were not imperial has-beens, as the conventional story reads. They took initiatives to counter economic and cultural challenges, and played crucial roles in the conflicts and connections that animated world politics. Our chapters take up the trajectories of these empires, with their traditions, tensions, and competitions with each other.

We examine as well the strikingly different ways in which imperial expansion across land—not just seas—produced distinct configurations of politics and society. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the United States and Russia extended their rule across continents. Russia’s repertoire of rule—inherited from a mix of imperial predecessors and rivals—relied on bringing ever more people under the emperor’s care—and of course exploitation—while maintaining distinctions among incorporated groups. American revolutionaries invoked a different imperial politics, turning ideas of popular sovereignty against their British masters, then constructing an “Empire of Liberty” in Thomas Jefferson’s words. The United States, expanding as Americans conquered indigenous peoples or acquired parts of others’ empires, created a template for turning new territories into states, excluded Indians and slaves from the polity, and managed to stay together after a bitter civil war fought over the issue of governing different territories differently. In the late nineteenth century the young empire extended its power overseas—without developing a generally accepted idea of the United States as a ruler of colonies.

Britain, France, Germany, and other European countries were less reticent about colonial rule, and they applied it with vigor to new acquisitions in Africa and Asia in the late nineteenth century. These powers, however, found by the early twentieth century that actually governing African and Asian colonies was more difficult than military conquest. The very claim to be bringing “civilization” and economic “progress” to supposedly backward areas opened up colonial powers to questioning from inside, from rival empires, and from indigenous elites over what, if any, forms of colonialism were politically and morally defensible.

Empires, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as in the sixteenth, existed in relation to each other. Different organizations of power—colonies, protectorates, dominions, territories forced into a dominant culture, semi-autonomous national regions—were combined in different ways within empires. Empires drew on human and material resources beyond the reach of any national polity, seeking control over both contiguous and distant lands and peoples.

In the twentieth century it was rivalry among empires—made all the more acute by Japan’s entry into the empire game and China’s temporary lapse out—that dragged imperial powers and their subjects around the world into two world wars. The devastating consequences of this interempire conflict, as well as the volatile notions of sovereignty nourished within and among empires, set the stage for the dissolution of colonial empires from the 1940s through the 1960s. But the dismantling of this kind of empire left in place the question of how powers like the United States, the USSR, and China would adapt their repertoires of power to changing conditions.

What drove these major transformations in world politics? It used to be argued that empires gave way to nation-states as ideas about rights, nations, and popular sovereignty emerged in the west. But there are several problems with this proposition. First, empires lasted well beyond the eighteenth century, when notions of popular sovereignty and natural rights captured political imagination in some parts of the world. Furthermore, if we assume that the origins of these concepts were “national,” we miss a crucial dynamic of political change. In British North America, the French Caribbean, Spanish South America, and elsewhere, struggles for political voice, rights, and citizenship took place within empires before they became revolutions against them. The results of these contests were not consistently national. Relationships between democracy, nation, and empire were still debated in the middle of the twentieth century.

Other studies of world history attribute major shifts to the “rise of the state” in the “early modern period,” two terms tied to the notion of a single path toward a normal and universal kind of sovereignty—the “western” kind. Scholars have advanced different dates for the birth of this “modern” state system—1648 and the Treaty of Westphalia, the eighteenth century with its innovations in western political theory, the American and French revolutions. But expanding our outlook over space and back in time and focusing on empires allows us to see that states have institutionalized power for over two millennia in different parts of the world. A story of European state development and other people’s “responses” would misrepresent the long-term dynamics of state power in both Europe and the rest of the world.

To the extent that states became more powerful in England and France in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these transformations were a consequence of empire, rather than the other way around. As powers trying to control large spaces, empires channeled widely produced resources into state institutions that concentrated revenue and military force. War among empires in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries set the stage for revolutionary movements that challenged Europe’s empire-st...